


Here and Now

by DarlaBlack



Series: Ficlets & Prompt Responses [2]
Category: The X-Files
Genre: Episode: s06e14 Monday, F/M, Light Angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-29
Updated: 2018-06-29
Packaged: 2019-05-30 05:36:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 476
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15090125
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DarlaBlack/pseuds/DarlaBlack
Summary: She remembers.





	Here and Now

Mulder was in full projector-mode, rattling on about something called the “black pit” and a haunted train tunnel. He had slides, interviews with locals, even an audio recording of what he swore was EVP of a hundred-years-dead mine-worker. He was in the middle of flashing to a new slide–1950s newspaper clippings–when the thought (no, the memory) came to her—a false remembrance (a truth), a surety that could not ever have been (but it was).

The bank, his soft head in her lap, blood covering her hands as she tried to hold his life force in, tried to will his heart to keep beating. His sweat-prickled brow and unfocused eyes, lost in the shadow of death that was surely consuming him. The wet sound of his labored breathing. If she hadn’t been sitting, she’d have fallen down.

Mulder looked at her across the projector and stopped talking. “What’s that look for? Did I do something wrong?”

She opened her mouth to speak, but no words would come out. She was reliving it, that look in his eyes, begging her to make it better, that feeling of utter hopelessness when she saw the wound, his blood seeping into the fabric at her knees. She had lost him. She had lost him again and again on that day. Yet she had him here before her.

“Scully?”

She looked at him now, so full of life, practically bouncing with the joy of this case, and she was helpless to stop the tears that filled her eyes and blurred her vision.

“Mulder,” she whispered. “Mulder, I remember. I remember what happened in the bank.” He came to stand by her side, took her hands in his as he squatted to her eye level.

“Scully what are you talking about?”

She pulled one hand free to cup his face. “Oh, Mulder,” she said. “You died.”

He had only vague, ethereal impressions of what that day could have been (had been), impressed on him by that tragic, desperately disheveled woman who had died (instead of them). “You remember?”

She nodded, fingers on the warmth of his cheek, eyes drenched in agony but also sweet, overwhelming relief. He was solid and warm, and she could feel his breath on the inside her wrist. Not dead. That couldn’t have happened, must have been some kind of dream she’d had. Scully shook her head, trying to find her way back from the disorienting tilt of some other, impossible reality. She let her hand drop from his face. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t know what happened, why I thought—“

“No,” he said. “No, it did happen. It did.”

“But we’re still here.”

It was his turn now to cup her cheek, to feel the solidity of her in this version of their lives that was not (yet) tragic. “We’re still here,” he said.

**Author's Note:**

> A little ficlet based on the prompt, “What’s that look for? Did I do something wrong?”


End file.
